Covering the blossoming startup industry in Portland, Oregon, and the Silicon Forest

April 9th, 2008

COLOURlovers chases Webby for the second year in a row

How’s this for a little local color? Err… colour? (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

Portland-based COLOURlovers, the community site that allows those enamored with hues and saturation to share their palette creations and ideas with the artistic community worldwide, has been nominated for the Webby Awards “Best Community Website” for the second year in a row.

What are the Webby Awards? They’re awards that are so cool they actually survived the dotbomb implosion:

Hailed as the “Oscars of the Internet” by the New York Times, The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet, including Websites, interactive advertising, online film and video, and mobile Websites. The Webby Awards is presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a 550-person judging academy whose members include Internet co-inventor Vinton Cerf, R/GA’s Chief Bob Greenberg, “Simpson’s” creator [and Oregonian, I might add] Matt Groening, Arianna Huffington, and Harvey Weinstein.

If you’re like me (and I know you are), I’d really like to see a Portland site walking away with one of these awards. Especially given that this is COLOURlovers’ second nomination.

But they’ve got some tough competition. Some would call it “insurmountable.” I mean, they’re up against the likes of del.icio.us, Flickr, and StumbleUpon. And I know “the nomination is an honor in and of itself.” But wouldn’t be nice to give COLOURlovers a fighting chance?

Well, you can. Through the “People’s Voice” voting.

That’s right friends. American-Idol-esque voting has permeated the Webbys, as well.

So, if you haven’t visited before, swing by COLOURlovers and take a look. They boast and extremely active community in an extremely niche space. And they’re just darn pretty, to boot.

Thanks for the great support. I agree that the challenge of facing the membership base of Flickr and StumbleUpon in a popularity contest is pretty huge… but at least we can give them a good run and show them the quality of our community and support with the number of comments we get.

Again, thanks for sharing our work and I hope we can bring a little of the webby love back to Portland.

Met Monsef Darius of COLOURlovers last year at the FOWA here in Manhattan (sorry, I’m not in the land of Coffee People) and not only was he a great guy, he was smart and very forward-thinking in what he was doing. Would love to see them get some well-earned accolades for their efforts.

Sorry Darius, just realized how cut-n-paste, when artfully combined with an address book application that likes to seemingly sort first names and surnames at random, can make one look like a real doofus.

Then again, walking around being called spacemonkey all these years has left me somewhat immune to ego.

[...] was the first member, but more than 100,000 have since joined. We’ve been nominated for Best Community Site in the Webby Awards two years in a row and have also received recognition for the quality of our community from several other periodicals [...]

[...] was the first member, but more than 100,000 have since joined. We’ve been nominated for Best Community Site in the Webby Awards two years in a row and have also received recognition for the quality of our community from several other periodicals [...]

[...] was the first member, but more than 100,000 have since joined. We’ve been nominated for Best Community Site in the Webby Awards two years in a row and have also receivedrecognition for the quality of our community from several other periodicals [...]